Taizoin Temple Main Hall

A Small Hōjō, and Why Scale Matters

Taizo-in Hondo (退蔵院本堂, Taizō-in Hondō) is the main hall of Taizo-in, a subtemple of Myoshinji at Hanazono Myoshinji-cho, Ukyo Ward, Kyoto, built in 1602 and designated an Important Cultural Property on 15 June 1967. The designation includes an attached entrance building and one ridge tablet.

Taizo-in was founded in 1404 by Hatano Shigemichi, a landholder from Echizen, who invited Muin Sōin, third abbot of Myoshinji, as founding priest. The temple originally stood near Senbon and Matsubara and was later moved into the Myoshinji precinct. It burned in the Ōnin War alongside its parent temple; the revival is credited to Kinen Zen'yu around 1597, and the present hall followed five years after that.

The register gives dimensions of 16.9 metres along the front and 10.9 metres in depth, single-storey, hipped-and-gabled, with a kokerabuki roof of thin split cypress shingles. The Agency for Cultural Affairs commentary describes it as a representative example of the hōjō-format main hall at somewhat reduced scale.

Reading a Hōjō Plan

The word hōjō means ten feet square and refers originally to the modest cell of a Zen abbot. By the Momoyama period the term had come to describe a standardised building: six rooms in two rows of three, sliding partitions between them, a Buddha room at the centre rear, and a veranda facing a garden on the south. Zen subtemples across Kyoto repeat this arrangement with variations, which is precisely what makes it useful to historians. When the frame is fixed, the deviations carry information.

Taizo-in's deviations are noted in the specialist literature. The hall does not place the usual panelled doors at the centre of the front elevation, and behind the Buddha room it sets a long room of five mats. Both features are read as retentions of an older manner, from the years before the type hardened into convention. Sitting a small hall of 1602 next to the larger subtemple hōjō of the same decades makes that argument visible on the ground.

The two attached items deserve attention as well. A ridge tablet, munafuda, is the board a carpenter installs at completion recording the date, the patron and the craftsmen. It is the single most reliable dating instrument in Japanese architecture, and its inclusion in the 1967 designation means the 1602 date rests on documentary rather than stylistic grounds. The attached entrance is the formal approach to the hall, and the two were repaired together under a project reported by the Kyoto Prefectural Board of Education in 1974.

The garden on the hall's west side, known as Motonobu's Garden, was designated a Place of Scenic Beauty and Historic Site in 1931 and is attributed by tradition to the painter Kanō Motonobu. The attribution is not settled. The present hall dates only to 1602, and the existence of any earlier hall on the site has not been established, which leaves the relationship between garden and building open.

Getting Inside

This is the practical point that trips visitors up. General admission to Taizo-in costs 700 yen for adults including high school students, and 400 yen for primary and junior high school pupils, with reception from 9:00 to 17:00, or to 16:00 from mid-December through the end of February. That ticket takes about twenty to thirty minutes and gives you the grounds, the modern strolling garden called Yokoen laid out by Nakane Kinsaku in 1965, and a view of the dry garden. It does not take you into the main hall.

For that, book the special viewing. It runs for groups of roughly ten to thirty by prior application at a flat 1,000 yen, takes about thirty minutes, and includes the interior of the hall, the dry garden seen from within it, the reproduction of the National Treasure painting Hyōnenzu, and the concealed tea room in the shoin. During the busy spring and autumn periods an alternative plan may be offered. If your reason for coming is the architecture, this is the ticket you want.

On the Hyōnenzu: the original, painted by Josetsu at the command of an Ashikaga shogun and counted among the earliest Japanese ink paintings, is on deposit at the Kyoto National Museum. What is shown at the temple is a copy, clearly identified as such.

The interior partition paintings were replaced in 2022 by the artist Murabayashi Yuki, working in the finest Echizen paper and Nara ink with the intention that they last four centuries. The Momoyama-period Kanō school paintings they succeeded had deteriorated badly. Sources naming the earlier painter are not consistent, so the attribution is best left open.

Reach the temple from JR Hanazono Station on the Sagano Line, about seven minutes on foot, or from Myoshinji Station on the Randen Kitano Line, about ten minutes via the north gate. City buses stop at Myoshinji-mae and Myoshinji-kitamon-mae. The grounds are mostly level but the paths are gravel, with a few steps at the hall and the garden, so wheelchair users should bring someone who can assist.